Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995
Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019
American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L Mickenberg, University of Chicago Press, 426pp, $38, ISBN: 978-0226256122
What is it about millennials and their conceit about changing the world? The most politically committed of those born around the dawn of the twentieth century were that arrogant. They believed they knew better than their parents, their bosses, their priests; some, most outrageously, than their husbands. Millions joined trade unions and political parties linked to them. They dreamed of a brotherhood and sisterhood that transcended borders. They found inspiration in singing the Internationale. The secular hymn, with its archaic but stirring lyrics, had become the socialist anthem in the late nineteenth century and was sung at all Communist International (Comintern) meetings. From 1918 to 1944 it was also the official anthem of the Soviet Union.
Arise ye starvelings from your slumber
Arise ye prisoners of want,
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
Who among us, of a certain age and politics has not, at least once, joined in the chorus and pledged, rhetorically, to ‘face the last fight’? For a surprising number of early twentieth century radicals, the pledge was not just rhetoric. Enticed by what Boris Pasternak called the ‘infectious universality’ of the Bolshevik Revolution, they were prepared to dedicate their life to communism. And they were not lacking ambition. The ‘prize’ being proclaimed in the anthem was nothing less than ‘to unite the human race’, the epitome of Enlightenment ambition – and a utopian fantasy.
But for the internationalists of a century ago anything seemed possible. Had not the Russian revolution consigned a centuries-old empire to the ‘dustbin of history’ to use a phrase coined by Leon Trotsky. The Russian poet Mayakovsky rhapsodised in 1917: ‘Today the one-thousand-year-old “Before” has collapsed. Today the foundations of worlds have been reconfigured.’ The emergent Soviet Union inherited a country with the largest land mass in the world, with a population of 125 million composed of a diverse nationalities, cultures and religions. The Bolsheviks then went on to defeat Western interventionist armies. Radicals everywhere looked on in astonished admiration.
Knowing what we now know about later Soviet history, the show trials, the purges, the ‘Great Terror’, the Gulags and, finally, the ignoble end of the Soviet project, it can be difficult to appreciate the attraction of, and the widespread acclaim for, the Russian Revolution. Spontaneous celebrations broke out in cities throughout Europe. In Dublin approximately 10,000 people rallied in and outside the Mansion House in February 1917. And it wasn’t just the ‘servile masses’ who hailed the revolution. It also inspired many middle class intellectuals. The late Tony Judt, no admirer of communism, conceded in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century that Marxism ‘held an unparalleled hold on some of the best minds of the last century’ and that the ‘intellectual and cultural history of the age is inseparable from the magnetic attraction of Marxist ideas and their revolutionary promise’. It is perhaps not surprising that early twentieth century progressives of all classes were receptive to Marxism. Appalled by the slaughter of a war they had lived through, they were bound to find a movement based on rational, secular, internationalist and socialist ideals alluring. The Great War had accentuated class divisions and inequality. As working class soldiers died in their millions in the trenches, the armaments industry made obscene fortunes for its owners and investors. Many aligned themselves to revolutionary parties in their resident countries. Some took themselves off to Russia to see for themselves.
As with almost political movements then and since, women constituted a minority of the activists, but a much more substantial minority than in contemporary equivalents. Figures like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Alexandra Kollontai in Russia were prominent within the communist ranks. Early Soviet edicts proclaiming equality between the sexes impressed feminists everywhere. The new codes contained provisions for maternity leave and child care, abortion, divorce and the abolition of the concept of illegitimacy. This represented an unparalleled advance at a time when almost everywhere else the issue of women’s right to vote was still being contested or restricted and when married women were deemed to be the property of their husbands. Thousands of American ‘new women’ visited the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century according to Julia L Mickenberg in American Girls. It is a story that’s ‘as much repressed as forgotten’. Some of those who travelled assumed the revolution would involve equality in marriage and sex.
May O’Callaghan was one of those attracted to the new Bolshevik state. Born in Wexford in 1881, the daughter of a senior RIC officer, she had the good fortune and the intellect to study at Vienna University. Later she worked for the radical socialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst in London. In the summer of 1924, aged forty-three, she travelled by boat and train to Moscow to begin work with the Comintern, the Communist International, as a translator. She would play a small role in the International Revolutionary Movement that she had, at least informally, aligned herself to for some years past. We have Maurice Casey, the author of Hotel Lux, to thank for rescuing this fascinating Irish woman from historical obscurity. He discovered mention of her, often referenced as O’C, in memoirs and letters written by former residents of this former imperial-era Moscow hotel where she was to reside from 1924 to 1928 and which had become a dormitory for mostly overseas employees as well as delegates attending Comintern meetings. Casey’s book, infused with impressive research, provides an absorbing account of the lives and loves of a group of mid-1920s residents, a cabal of enthusiastic young communists, who formed close and often intense friendships that were, for most, to last a lifetime. May O’Callaghan was to be the fulcrum of this collective.
She had previously become close friends with two London communists who also feature in Casey’s story, sisters from the East End, Rose and Nellie Cohen, born to Polish-Jewish parents. All three had worked in Pankhurst’s suffragette organisation in which the Irishwoman had taken on the job of editing The Woman’s Dreadnought. Pankhurst, enthused by the Russian Revolution, established a People’s Russian Information Service, managed by O’Callaghan. This was a modest propaganda agency that operated from a room in a Fleet Street. We can safely assume therefore that May had become an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution before she embarked on her journey to Moscow. However, this is unlikely to have been her first encounter with suffragette and socialist radicalism.
O’Callaghan spent her formative adult years in Austria, studying and lecturing at Vienna University at a time of major political tension. The social democrats, at that period largely Marxist in orientation, were a growing force in the empire, and especially in Vienna. The party’s constitution included a demand for universal suffrage regardless of sex, making it perhaps the first substantial political party in Europe to pursue the cause of equal voting rights for women. By 1907, the imperial government was willing to concede universal suffrage, but only for men. This was partly due to hostile Catholic and conservative nationalist opinion in Poland and elsewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The social democrats reluctantly agreed to confine their demands for the moment to universal male suffrage, which was seen by the broader labour movement as a significant concession. It was a case of women must wait, although the labour women’s movement did not cease campaigning. A huge rally to celebrate inaugural International Working Women’s Day as it was then called, took place on Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1911. The concept of an International Women’s Day was first proposed that year by the German communist Clara Zetkin.
During the period that O’Callaghan lived there Vienna was something of safe haven for radicals and revolutionaries. Trotsky lived there from 1907 to 1914. Stalin spent some time there in 1913 when the two men had an uncomfortable meeting at the Café Central. O’Callaghan is unlikely to have known of them, but their bitter rivalry was later to have consequences for her career and for the lives of some of her future Hotel Lux friends.
Class conflict was a feature of many European cities prior to the outbreak of war in 1914. For decades the trade union and allied labour movement had been growing in numbers and militancy. It was to become arguably the most consequential movement of the twentieth century. Membership expanded rapidly during and after the First World War, in Britain in 1918 doubling to eight million from pre-war levels. In Germany in 1920, twelve million workers took part in a general strike against an attempted military putsch. The war also led to women becoming a significant part of the industrial workforce for the first time as they replaced conscripted men. The movement was internationalist in sentiment, but not in substance, as during the war, the labour and social democratic parties in the belligerent states supported their governments’ war efforts, leading to the dissolution of the Second (Socialist) International.
The Russian Revolution of February 1917 was sparked by a demonstration of women textile workers on International Women’s Day. The October Revolution in Petrograd (St Petersburg) that brought the Bolsheviks to power was provoked by a demonstration of women protesting against bread shortages and high prices. One of the early decisions made by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in power was to establish a new Communist (Third) International, also known as the Comintern. He believed that his Soviet state was unsustainable without other successful revolutions in Western countries. The role of the Comintern therefore was to encourage, indeed ferment, worldwide evolution. Brigitte Studer, a Swiss historian, author of Travellers of the World Revolution, is not overstating matters when she says of the Comintern that the ‘twentieth century knew of no other organisation or social movement so international in its rhetoric, so transnational in its practice, so global in its ambitions’. To work for the Comintern was a ‘life-changing decision’, particularly for those engaged in undercover work. Agents, operating under false identities, were sent to all the major countries of the world. This was hazardous work, with the agents at high risk of being arrested or even shot. The Moscow-based Comintern had about 800 people at work on any particular day in the 1920s. This does not include the thousands of voluntary agents recruited from within the national communist parties or those assigned to work with subsidiary bodies like the ‘Red Unions’ international (Profintern) or the Communist Youth International. About three-quarters of Comintern staff were non-Soviet citizens and 20 per cent were women, who predominated in the translation and secretarial services. Some of these could, however, be transferred to the more dangerous undercover work, as was Rose Cohen, O’Callaghan’s friend and flatmate from her London days.
The public work of the Comintern involved World Congresses, attended by delegates from national communist parties. The Congress was, in theory at least, the governing body of the world-wide communist movement, with an executive committee (ECCI) adjudicating on matters between congresses. The chair and effective leader initially was Grigory Zinoviev, a leading member of the Soviet politburo. He fell out of favour with Stalin in 1926 due to his leading role in the ‘Left Opposition’ and was replaced by Nikolai Bukharin, who later also fell into disfavour, being accused of ‘right deviationism’. The Comintern was always in reality dominated by the Soviets, and utterly so by 1928, when Stalin established himself as effective dictator. Zinoviev and Bukharin were both executed during the ‘Terror’ of 1937. But this distant and dismal future was not foreseen by the residents of the Hotel Lux in the mid-1920s. The years from 1923 to 1927 proved to be, in retrospect, a relatively free and liberating period after the horrors of the Civil War and prior to the purges. For the residents of the Hotel Lux indeed this period could have been experienced as halcyon days. Ordinary Muscovites, still coping with shortages and vastly overcrowded housing conditions, might have viewed it somewhat differently. Elsewhere, in regions blighted by recent famines, especially in Ukraine, survivors would have been in an entirely different frame of mind.
Hotel Lux – the name was something of misnomer since it no longer functioned as a normal hotel – no longer offered the luxury its title suggested. The only reminder of its past glory was its neo-classical facade and it was now infested with bedbugs, cockroaches and rodents. Yet for all its shortcomings, it seems to have make an indelible impression on its residents. Jack Murphy, a leading member of the British Communist Party and a resident Comintern delegate, recalled it as:
The most interesting hotel which I have ever stayed in […] not [for] its efficient service and its external and internal grandeur, but in the human material which flowed through it. The stream was constant. The visitors came from all ends of the earth. Workers, intellectuals, artists, ambitious politicians, revolutionaries, all vital, alive, intelligent, battling with ideas, some playing their own hand, others deputising for somebody else. Here were love affairs and tragedies, new political stars in the revolutionary firmament, damp squibs, fun, fights, storms, celebrations, conspiracies, disclosures, jealousies, clash of national customs, and such a variety of appearance that variety itself became commonplace.
Murphy was well-known, although not always well-liked, among Irish comrades, having been one of a three-man CPGB investigation team appointed by the Comintern to examine the affairs of the Roddy Connolly-led Communist Party of Ireland. The Comintern at that time deemed the British party to have an oversight role over the Irish party, something that grated with the small but strongly nationalist Irish membership. The group recommended the dissolution of the CPI in 1924. Murphy was, nevertheless, on good terms with members of May O’Callaghan’s circle of friends.
O’Callaghan had arrived at the Hotel Lux in July 1924, six months after Lenin’s death with an uneasy ruling troika, of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin in situ. The three had coalesced in order to prevent Trotsky from gaining power, although the latter remained, for now, a member of the politburo and individuals were not afraid of expressing support for him. May’s arrival coincided with the departure of her friend Rose Cohen, who moved back to London to begin work her undercover work. Soon afterwards an American woman, Ruth Kennell, arrived at the Lux. May and Ruth were to become close friends. Maurice Casey describes it as involving ‘an intimacy of such intensity […] that rumours began circulating that the two were something more than simply friends’. May was amused when she later learned of this rumour, but Ruth thought it disgusting that the happiness she experienced in May’s presence should have led to salacious gossip. Casey speculates that O’Callaghan may have been lesbian, but, now in early middle age, she seems to have avoided sexual entanglements of any substance during her stay in Moscow. Ruth, for her part, had enough encounters with men to keep her sexually occupied.
O’Callaghan had been allocated a relatively spacious room overlooking Tyerskaya Street, which most parades and demonstrations traversed. Ruth, who shared a room on a higher floor, spent most of her evenings in May’s room. They dined together and went to artistic and literary events in the city. Ruth, now thirty, had left her librarian job in Richmond, California in 1922 after she and her husband volunteered to work in a Siberian industrial settlement, known as Kuzbas, run on socialist lines. This was the brainchild of ‘Big’ Bill Haywood, leader of the ‘Wobblies’ (Industrial Workers of the World) and authorised by Lenin. The colony attracted hundreds of overseas volunteers, mainly American men and women. Ruth acted as secretary and librarian for the colony. After working the pledged two years, Ruth moved to Moscow, while her husband returned to the US.
Another member of May’s inner circle was Emmy Leonhard, a German revolutionary in her mid-thirties. Although from a wealthy family background, she had been a radical activist within the German social democrats during the attempted revolution in Hamburg in 1918 and was elected to the Hamburg parliament while still in her twenties. She later moved to Amsterdam to work for the International Transport Union Federation (ITUF). In 1923 she joined the German Communist Party (KPD) and in the following year travelled to Moscow to begin working as a translator for the Profintern. It’s likely she was recommended for this role by the ITUF general secretary, Edo Fimmen, with whom she had begun a romantic relationship. Already pregnant when she arrived at the Hotel Lux in early 1925, within a few months she went into labour and needed urgent help. May O’Callaghan came to her rescue, arranging for a taxi and paying for it to transport her to hospital. The two women had already become friends and this act of kindness cemented the bond between them. The fact that Edo was already married was not a matter of concern to May, although Emmy might have wished otherwise. Soon after her daughter was born, the KPD, ordered her, against her wishes, to return to Berlin.
May O’Callaghan was to assist with another pregnancy after Nellie Cohen, Rose’s elder sister and close friend of May from her London days, arrived in Moscow for a short visit. It was long enough though for her have an encounter with the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty, which led to her becoming pregnant with his child. May was to provide more long-term assistance in this instance for she was to become almost a second mother to Nellie’s daughter, Joyce. O’Flaherty was in Moscow at that time seeking to have his books published in Russian, a project May was assisting him with. O’Flaherty was not to learn of his daughter’s existence until many years later.
There were two male members of May’s group, Hugo Rathbone and Joseph Freeman, who shred a room at the Lux. Rathbone (who was later to marry Nellie and become a loving father to Joyce) was the son of a Liberal Party MP and had an accent that revealed his upper class pedigree. His role in the Comintern seems to have been to prepare draft reports on colonial countries, notably India, on which he had become expert. This work brought him into close collaboration with Manabendra Nath (MN) Roy an Indian revolutionary, prominent within the upper echelons of the Comintern at that time.
Joseph Freeman was a New York-based member of the US Communist Party. Born into a Yiddish-speaking family who fled a pogrom in Ukraine to reach America when he was seven. After graduating from Columbia University, he began a journalistic career, before co-founding New Masses, a magazine linked to the Communist Party, in 1926. He travelled across Russia as a correspondent for the magazine before he began work as a Comintern translator. He was now working under the direction of O’Callaghan, who by this time had been promoted to head the English language section. Freeman was then, and for years afterwards, an enthusiastic communist who bridled at any criticism of the Soviet regime. It was the NEP (New Economic Plan), instituted in 1921, that allowed small-scale private farms and businesses to exist, resulting in some amelioration of earlier food and other shortages. While May, Ruth and Emmy were generally impressed by Soviet life, they occasionally expressed irritations about conditions, not least in the Lux, where hygiene arrangements were abysmal, with only two bathrooms for over 300 residents. Freeman considered himself a poet, and composed verses in praise of Soviet society. In his memoir, An American Testament, written a decade after these events, he recalls May telling him to, ‘put that in your sonnets, but don’t mix poetry with facts’. May, it seems, never allowed her commitment to communism to blind her to its flaws and limitations.
The working time commitment demanded of Comintern office staff was not onerous. Translators and others worked six hours daily for six days a week. Sunday was generally a rest day, so staff had generous rest and recreation time, especially those not obliged to attend after-hours party meetings. And it seems there were many social activities for them to enjoy in Hotel Lux. The more boisterous, it seems, began only around midnight. Brigitte Studer sets the scene in Travellers:
… then 11 o’clock in the evening, the telephones in the hotel rooms would ring as the residents of the Lux start inviting each other to midnight suppers. Alcohol flowed freely on these occasions. It seems, with the salaries of the NEP period (around 500 roubles for Comintern functionaries), money was no problem.
The partying often continued into the early hours, despite complaints from the occasional ‘killjoy’.
MN Roy, the then thirty-three-year-old Indian revolutionary who attended many of these soirées, came to regard his time at the Lux as profoundly enriching. ‘Whoever had the opportunity to live in the Hotel Lux in these early years of the Revolution must cherish the memory as one of the richest experiences of his life.’ This was equally true for many women residents, some of whom Roy came to know intimately. Having been expelled from his homeland by the British Indian authorities, Roy began a lengthy odyssey. He travelled to California, where he met and married the American writer and anti-colonialist feminist Evelyn Trent. To avoid arrest they moved to Mexico, where both were involved in the establishment of the Communist Party of Mexico. The pair separated in 1925 after travelling to Moscow, but by then Roy had been smitten by a young German woman, Luise Geissler.
O’Callaghan organised regular soirées in her room, events that probably began well before midnight. These appear to have been, mostly, sober affairs, more literary salon then ‘knees-up’. Apart from their socialist convictions, May’s group were united in their mutual interest in modern art and literature. She had lectured in Vienna on the work of Irish writers and she obviously had retained this interest given her admiration for, and later friendship with, Liam O’Flaherty. Furthermore, as Maurice Casey gleans from archived correspondence, she had read Joyce’s Ulysses and, it seems, became an early enthusiast. She also took an interest in contemporary Russian literature and would often invite Russian writers to sessions in her room. These were informal gatherings, designed to exchange knowledge and experiences. Among the Russian invitees was Osip Beskin, a prominent literary and art critic who worked in the state publishing house. It was probably through him that May met the renowned poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was to commit suicide in 1930. May’s gatherings were not always highbrow. Vodka was sometimes available and Casey describes one occasion when she played jazz on a gramophone while demonstrating the Charleston, a dance she had learned during a recent trip back to her Vienna. The mid-twenties was interesting period for Soviet art and literature. Under the troika, there was a relatively liberal approach to the arts and artists and writers, who were allowed, within limits, to experiment and innovate, something that was to be curtailed by 1928.
When Joseph Freeman first arrived at the Hotel Lux he made for the room of Luise Geissler whom he had met previously in New York when she had attended a Comintern event there. Luise had been involved in revolutionary activity from the age of seventeen when she became involved with the short-lived revolutionary government in Munich in 1918. After the crushing of the Bavarian Soviet she was deported, having lost her German citizenship due to a brief marriage to a Swiss national. After a time in Zurich, she was able to return to Germany and began work for the KDP. In 1922, she started working for the Comintern as a stenographer. She was described by a former colleague as ‘uncommonly pretty’ and ‘small and finely made like a Meissen figurine’. She and Freeman began a passionate but tempestuous relationship soon after his arrival. Through him, Luise became known to O’Callaghan and others in her circle and probably attended some of their gatherings. Geissler had a freewheeling approach to sex and relationships, something that seems to have troubled Freeman. She remained close to her former partner, Heinz Neumann a brilliant young German communist, who was also resident at the Lux. He was a member of the Comintern presidium, and was on friendly terms with Stalin. Freeman knew and admired Neumann but, it seems, was tortured by being unsure of the nature of Geissler’s continued friendship with him, and later by her growing attachment to Roy. In his American Testament, he depicts Geissler in terms that Casey describes as ‘unflattering, even embittered’. ‘Unflattering’ indeed greatly understates the nature of the character assassination involved.
The subtitle of Casey’s Hotel Lux promises an ‘intimate history’, and this it delivers. Through diligent research the author uncovered letters and other materials that provide an insight into the personality of the principal characters he has chosen to focus on. Some may be perplexed by the attention given to the sexual activities of some of the Lux residents but this would be to ignore a significant debate within communism in the 1920s. This concerned women’s emancipation from what was considered ‘bourgeois’ morality’. This issue attracted sometimes heated debate within the party leadership at that time.
In the context of the early twentieth century, the advances achieved by women within Russia were unprecedented. Lenin facilitated more attention to women’s issues than some of his central committee might have felt warranted. He was aided, if not sometimes prodded, by a number of influential women, among them his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya; Inessa Armand, a French-Russian who was Lenin’s principal aide and confidante; Clara Zetkin, a German communist who had been a close ally of Rosa Luxemburg and, most prominently during the early years of the Bolshevik administration, Alexandra Kollontai.
Kollontai became a leading figure in the revolution and was elected to the central committee of the party before the October Revolution. As the daughter of an imperial Russian army general she was an improbable revolutionary. Appointed by Lenin as people’s commissar for welfare in the first Soviet government, she, aided by Armand in particular, legislated for women’s rights in the Soviet family law codes. Kollontai considered herself a ‘new woman’ something she defined in her 1918 book The New Woman and the Working Class as someone whose ‘feelings’ are no longer all-important, and whose love for a man no longer takes absolute priority. The new women she says ‘does not want exclusive possession when they love; since they demand respect for the freedom of their own feelings, they learn to accord this to others’. Kollontai married twice and had a succession of lovers. In her autobiography she titled herself, ‘A Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman’. However, her concept of sexual emancipation appalled Lenin, who accused her of promulgating, what he called the glass of water theory. This arose after she was alleged to have said ‘that the sex act should be viewed as equivalent to drinking a glass of water’. In fact she didn’t utter those words. What she said was ‘the sex act should be recognised as an act neither shameful nor sinful, but natural and legitimate, like every other manifestation of a healthy organism, like the satisfying of hunger or thirst.’ As Julia Mickenberg observes in American Girls: ‘Many young people in the Soviet Union seized upon Kollontai’s efforts to make sex a private affair between consenting adults as evidence that sexual licence was somehow radical. Some – men especially – simply assumed that sexual and political revolution went together.’ For some ‘free love’ was indeed part of the revolutionary package, but as Mickenberg implies, free love is only free if there is mutual consent.
Lenin chose to attack the ‘Glass of Water Theory’ in an interview he gave to Clara Zetkin on the ‘women’s question’ in 1920. He began by complaining about the extent to which the issues of sex and marriage were occupying he minds of her fellow German communists. ‘I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard it.’ Lenin might be considered a poor judge of the importance of the issue for women, although his views do need to be seen in the context of the continued armed conflict within the newly formed Soviet Union. While the main battles against the ‘White armies’ had been won, fighting continued in Poland and in other regions of the former Russian empire. Lenin told Zetkin: “’Now all the thoughts of the women comrades […] must be directed towards the proletarian revolution.’ He went on:
Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called ‘new sexual life’ of the youth – and sometimes of the old – often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we communists understand it. You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls […] Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?
On further examination the analogy is shocking. Although he, or perhaps Zetkin in her editing, does not specify gender, the reference to brothels makes it obvious that the ‘normal person’ here is male and the soiled glass a woman. Indeed Lenin may also have been hypocritical in his disparagement of ‘the new sex life of the youth’ for it is believed by some that he was in a ménage à trois involving Inessa Armand and his wife Krupskaya: Julia Mickenburg states this as a fact in American Girls. Perhaps he was not such a ‘gloomy ascetic’ after all.
Lenin’s criticism in 1920 suggests that the concept of the ‘new woman’ was making inroads among the younger comrades. Lenin wasn’t the only one shocked. Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky, then the two most prominent leaders after Lenin, voiced their concern about ‘sexual licentiousness’ among young communists. But in so far as attitudes to sex and marriage had changed, it wasn’t due primarily to revolutionary excess. Russian nineteenth century culture was not without its progressive aspects. The most influential nineteenth century Russian book was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, Stories about New People, which was published in 1863. The novel, with its advocacy of a new morality, had a profound influence particularly on women. Also, wars and their aftermath are known to have an impact on sexual mores. And it was the jazz age, even in Russia, when women like May O’Callaghan learnt to dance freely and exuberantly without being led by a man. Bohemianism was also a factor. Studer in Travellers remarks on the prevalence of bohemian and artistic avant-garde attitudes to sex and marriage within Comintern circles. Joseph Freeman mixed in bohemian circles when resident in Greenwich Village in New York and his once object of desire, Luise Geissler, would have encountered a prevalent bohemian environment in revolutionary Munich.
Freeman left Moscow in March 1927 and by the following year almost all of the friends assembled by May O’Callaghan were gone from the Lux. May herself left in January 1928 to help Nellie Cohen during her late pregnancy. She expected to return to Moscow but found she was unwelcome due to suspicions of her being a Trotskyite, possibly because of her continued correspondence with Emmy Leonhard, who was. Their Russian adventure was over. In hindsight, their departures were timely. The Soviet political climate was moving in a new, darker direction. As hopes for revolution elsewhere, and in Germany in particular, faded, Stalin proclaimed his theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’. While Lenin had deemed revolutions in other countries as essential to the future sustainability of the Russian Revolution, Stalin now said it was the other way round; the preservation of the Soviet Union was essential for future world revolution. The priority of the Comintern was now to support the only workers’ state. A process of Bolshevisation of the Comintern began. Strict discipline and total adherence to the policies of the USSR central committee was imposed on all communist parties. Zinoviev and Bukharin were stripped of their party membership, and later executed. Artistic freedom was curtailed. The regime became puritanical. Abortion was made illegal in 1936. Women disappeared from the public sphere. Kollontai was given a diplomatic post abroad, eventually becoming Soviet ambassador to Sweden, but was never permitted to return to Russia. (Armand had died in 1920) Krupskaya remained a member off the central committee, but after initially opposing Stalin, she later succumbed to his edicts. Fear became the dominant emotion during the ‘Great Terror’ of 1936 to 1938. This was a state-inflicted slaughter on a scale second only to the Holocaust. It is not always appreciated that the primary victims were communists. Foreign Comintern staff were particular targets after Stalin, in a paranoid outburst, declared that ‘everyone in the Communist International works for the enemy’. Only thirteen of the seventy-six Comintern delegates resident in the Soviet Union survived execution or imprisonment. Rose Cohen, along with her Russian husband, was among those executed as was Heinz Neumann, Geissler’s former partner. German communists, many having fled the Nazis, suffered disproportionally, with only a quarter surviving. It was a betrayal of gigantic proportions, of the individuals, and of the ideals of socialism and communism. It should have marked the death knell of Soviet communism, but it didn’t, at least not then. Stalin’s popularity rose with the Red Army’s success against the Nazis. Some still argue that their victory would not have been possible without Stalin’s ruthlessness. Could this, if true, justify the terror? Hardly, but that is another story entirely.
History does not look kindly on those who kept the communist faith. We don’t know how May O’Callaghan felt in the dismal aftermath, for if she expressed a view it was either not recorded or not discovered. We know from Casey’s research that she warmly welcomed the advance of the Red Army during WWII, but so did everyone else in England where she then lived. Nellie Cohen remained a committed communist, notwithstanding her sister’s execution. In the 1930s it seemed for many that the future lay either with fascism or communism and there was no doubt which side Nellie and May were on. In any event, a life-long commitment, especially one that involved much personal sacrifice, can be difficult to abandon. It’s hard to admit that cherished dreams were an illusion. It’s a difficulty that very many twentieth century communists faced in later life. Leon Rosselson, an English leftist balladeer, captured the dilemma, in his poignant but sympathetic ‘Song of an Old Communist’:
You may think we were duped, well we paid for our dreams –
Broken lives, broken marriages, jobs lost and jail
Some lost heart and left, some betrayed us for medals
There are always some turncoats whose souls are for sale
But the best of us never surrendered our vision
And we kept the faith through the bleakest defeat
Do you think that was easy, surrounded by hatred
The sneer of indifference, the hurt of deceit?
But then, in a final refrain, the ‘old communist’, addressing a group of uninterested young people, admonishes them while implicitly accepting his dream of a new world has evaporated.
But you, who have nothing at all to believe in
Oh you, whose motto is ‘money comes first’,
Who are you to tell us that our lives have been wasted
And all that we fought for has turned into dust?
Hotel Lux is an exceptionably readable work of history in which Maurice Carey allows the reader to gain an insight into the lives of some of his principal characters, helped by the inclusion in relevant pages of photographs obtained from various archives. The narrative pauses frequently to reveal details his fascinating research.
Brigitte Studer’s Travellers of the World Revolution is a more conventional work that focuses on the history, structure and activities of the Comintern. It also provides biographical details of numerous people, particularly women, involved with the organisation. The scope of her book is much wider, geographically and in terms of time span, as it encompasses the Conintern’s existence from 1919 to its end in 1943 when Stalin abolished it to placate his wartime allies. The book is a valuable addition to the historical record. However, the extent of detail provided tends to overwhelm at times.
Julia Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia tells the fascinating story of the many American women who travelled to the early Soviet Union. Some worked on famine relief, others went to assist the revolution more directly. She gives a detailed account of the Kuzbas Colony and examines the issue of ‘New Morality’ in Soviet Russia. Also recounted are the experiences of well-known personalities like Isadora Duncan, who established a modern dance troupe in Moscow. It is a fascinating account of scores of brave and adventurous women whose stories have heretofore have been largely forgotten or ignored.
1/7/2025
Tom Wall is a retired trade union official and the author of Dachau to the Dolomites, published by Merion Press, a revised edition of which was published with the title Himmler’s Hostages by Pen & Sword.
